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Re: Andre EDP Loops



Muso time!  :()

Kim Flint wrote:

> The lack of a saving capability in the EDP is a limitation, but at the 
>same
> time I found it oddly liberating after a while. 

Me too, for the same basic reasons you describe.

> A feeling of confidence grew out of that - I could
> rely on myself rather than a hard disk. From an improvising standpoint it
> was a great learning experience. It's certainly not a concept you can
> easily market, 

True - though for people coming from a more "playerly" side of things, I
think it could help reinforce the idea that an EDP is something designed
to create evolving, developing, non-static *performances,* as opposed to
static, fixed things that just loop over and over again...

> Godflesh, Meat Beat Manifesto, Puppy, Ministry, FLA, etc. It
> is really interesting to hear some of these bands develop over time to
> their greatest moments. Much of what makes industrial music work is the
> thudding aggressive repetition of the loops. But oftentimes that's where 
>it
> failed too. Some of it just goes nowhere with that.

I was never too into industrial as a genre, but I was a HUGE Skinny
Puppy fan for a while, and most of their stuff (certainly in the '88 -
'92 "golden era") was not particularly repetitive much of the time - you
never really knew when some new freakish event was going to ooze out of
the speaker, and the programming tended to be very meticulous and subtle
that way.

> there is still a chunky feeling.
> "Ok, let's turn this chunk on!" "Now mute this chunk and sing over it".
> "Now let's fade in this other chunk and play a short wave radio
> sample!"  It feels very constructed. 

Right, the whole "grid" - based sound.  I think this was popularized by
people like NIN and Garbage in the mid-'90s, and it was a cool sound -
the chorus suddenly has a completely different arrangement and texture,
and it slams you on the head right on the downbeat of a section.

But it became a HUGE cliche, and now you can practically smell that
stuff coming a mile away - "Ooooh, they're gonna have a big burst of
guitars and heavy beats four bars from now!"  It gets to the point where
you can visualize the way the computer screen looked when they were
assembling the songs, and you can hear the different sections being
telegraphed long before they show up.  It can still be used effectively,
I think, but I'm really burned out on it myself.

> Don't get me wrong, it's brilliant, I
> can listen to it all day (and I did....)  but they never quite get the
> in-the-moment live feeling, and sometimes I really miss the energy of 
>that.

One of the things I like about good IDM, or hip-hop, or mid-'90s drum
and bass, is that there's an attention to subtle variation and detail
that keeps the stuff from sounding overly "sequencer-assembled"... and I
have to wonder if a certain amount of that doesn't come from the fact
that a lot of those guys didn't HAVE swanky software programs to run on
a G4.  

Squarepusher or Public Enemy were making records with tools that didn't
necessarily lend themselves to loop-based music fundamentally, and I
have to think that a certain amount of the subtlety and detail in their
music is there specifically because they HAD to do it in a fairly
meticulous, hands-on manner.

As cool as programs like ACID and Ableton Live! are, they still strike me
as being products of the "grid" paradigm in a way.  Yes, there are lots
of ways to use those tools to break out of these kinds of aesthetic
ruts, but I wonder if people will be inclined to dig into those areas.  

When there are that many options available at any one time, it can get
very hard to make a decision on any of them.  Whereas if you're having
to really construct the material in a deliberate (or real-time!) manner,
I think there's a tendency to work with an idea and SHAPE it into
something... instead of discarding it immediately if it doesn't happen to
instantly sound good next to the other 8 tracks of automatically 
beatmatched ACID or LIVE! loops...

Never mind me,

--Andre LaFosse
http://www.altruistmusic.com